July 26, 2012

A few weeks out, and word of Agent Higgs is spreading. In fact, here’s a list of articles you can check out about the game:

• New Scientist – by Stephen Ornes
• Discovery News – by Jennifer Ouellette
• WebProNews – by Drew Bowling
• PhysicsWorld – by Tushna Commissariat
• The Reference Frame – by Me! (Posted kindly by Lubos Motl)
• Harry Balls – by John Busher
• Planet-Science – by P-S staff (NEW!)
• Washington Post – by Aaron Leitko (NEW!)
• Overclockers Club – by Guest_Jim (NEW!)

A big thanks to all the writers who have taken time to check out my game, play it, and write articles about it. I really appreciate it.

And a HUGE thanks to all the great people who have been tweeting about my game, liking it on facebook, stumbling-upon-it, telling their friends and family, and sending smoke signals. Both your feedback and enthusiasm are wonderful.

Stay tuned for more developments (articles, updates, news) on Agent Higgs. And keep playing!

-Andy

July 20, 2012

I’m working on the new levels to Agent Higgs at the moment. My plan has always been to extend the game not just to the leptons (neutrinos, electrons, muons, taus), but also to the quarks. I’m working on adding new and interesting levels that encapsulate QCD. The quark levels should be out in a few weeks.

Of course, the recent discovery of a Higgs-like boson is another big motivator for some updates. You’d better believe that’s getting tied into the plotline, and I’m getting right on that. In the next update, in fact, expect some new levels about the Higgs field itself…

As I’m finishing up work on the update, take a look at some new screenshots:

Wanted: Decayed or Alive

Where’s his party hat?

Yikes! Things aren’t looking good for Higgs in that last panel! Hopefully you, the player, can help him out of the jam.

-Andy

July 10, 2012

It’s been a bit of a wild time over here, but just in case you haven’t heard: Agent Higgs has been found. Kudos to CERN!

Does that spell destruction for our favorite little particle? You’ll just have to tune into the future updates to Agent Higgs to see! I’m working right now on some new levels, and we’ll see how Higgs fares now that his cover has been blown…

I’ve really appreciated all the feedback I’ve been getting. Thanks for your emails everyone! I’ve passed out a few hints to some of the levels, too. All of them are solvable… but some can be pretty tough!

As I’m starting to work on the new levels, now is also a great time for any suggestions about the game. If anything really bothered you or confused you, let me know. I’ll fix up what I can to improve the game when the update comes.

I also had the great fortune to be written about in a couple more articles, go check them out!

• New York Times: What in the World Is a Higgs Boson? – by Dennis Overbye, a brief, brief mention of my game
• New York Times: CERN scientists find new subatomic particle; could be Higgs – by Laura Shin, another brief mention of my game
• Game Review on Tecca – by Jo McClelland

-Andy

July 3, 2012

As everyone knows (at least everyone who might stumble across this site), tomorrow is the day that CERN makes a major announcement about the Higgs boson. Seems we may have a discovery on our hands!

Will he finally be found?

And this of course begs two big questions:

1) If the Higgs boson is discovered, what does that mean for physics? Sure, it exists as expected, and sure, it is nice to confirm that we’re reasoning the right way. But physics needs to keep going forward, for we know there are things we don’t yet get. Will we get any hints towards ‘new’ physics, or will we still be in the dark about where to go next?

2)What will happen to Agent Higgs? The players have been doing their best to keep Higgs hidden from the scientists. So what will happen if he is found once and for all? An interesting question to ponder… especially for the guy who made the game!

All in all, it is an exciting time in physics (and an exciting time to be the guy who made a Higgs game). Check below for my ever-expanding list of news articles about Agent Higgs, and thank you to everyone who is helping out in spreading the word. The feedback and encouragement really keep me motivated to keep working on Higgs, and to start on my next project. (Hint, its topic rhymes with Squantum Mechanics…)

-Andy

July 2, 2012

A modified version of a recent post (by me) on The Reference Frame Blog:

The whole world is after the elusive Higgs boson. Accelerators the size of cities are being used to create truly awesome concentrations of energy in a vast number of collisions. We’ve detected the other particles of the Standard Model. Muons, quarks, neutrinos, the whole gambit. But not the Higgs. How is it avoiding detection?

Turns out, he doesn’t want to be found! In the iPhone/flash game Agent Higgs you take the side of Higgs, keeping him hidden from view. The protagonist: a hapless Higgs boson wearing funny glasses. The setting: a particle detector. You can learn more about my game here, and we’ll get to the details of it in a moment. As you can imagine, it has been a fun experiment for me (Andy Hall of TestTubeGames), trying to pull together a captivating game about Particle Physics. But first: WHY make a game about the Standard Model?

A bit of background about me: I’m a big fan of physics. I’ve been in both academic side and the teaching side (as an educator at a science museum). My favorite topics, though, are things like quantum mechanics and relativity, which presents a bit of a problem when it comes to science communication. We simply can’t interact with these realms in a hands-on way. And abstraction can be be a challenge for newcomers.

This is what brought me to technology. Through simulations, we CAN interact with extreme realms of physics. We can move individual muons around, or travel near the speed of light. These interactive experiences, to my view, are incredibly helpful to developing understanding. That’s why I started up TestTubeGames in 2011, to make scientifically interesting games.

I decided to make a game about the Standard Model because I think there’s a story there to tell. Frankly, if scientists enjoy thinking about a topic, something exciting is at its core. In Particle Physics, I personally enjoy the patterns. I find it remarkable that there is a small set of fundamental particles in the world, and their properties are related in predictable ways. There are a bunch of conservation laws, and curious interactions and behaviors (like neutrino oscillation or particle decay). Particle Physics is almost a game already.

I had this all firmly in mind when I designed the game. I didn’t want to make a game tangentially related to physics, but wanted rather to focus on my core interests in the topic. Thus, the pieces are the particles of the Standard Model (all the leptons, and eventually the quarks, too). As you move them around, you have to deal with the fundamental forces. Two electrons repel, say. A positron and electron will attract – and annihilate – in a burst of energy. Particles can sometimes decay, meaning a muon could turn into a W boson and neutrino. Even for people without much experience with the particles of the Standard Model, my hope is they can, by playing around, get an intuitive sense of their relationships and have fun doing it.

That last point, ‘having fun,’ is extremely important. I made a game, rather than a simulation, and I think this is valuable for many reasons. My previous game, Velocity Raptor, actually started off as a 2D Special Relativity simulator. I spent a lot of time making it highly accurate, and learned a great deal as I did. People would play around with it, and it would be cool. And that was where it stopped. After a couple minutes moving around in this wacky world, people would be done. Ready to move on.

That’s why I turned the simulation into a game. A game not only has a learning curve built right in, but it is also a lot of fun. It keeps players (hopefully) engaged for long periods of time. Long enough, perhaps, to teach them a thing or two. So I added in a central character (Velocity Raptor), an evil villain (Professor Rex), and a whole bunch of relativity-related puzzles to hook people. Thus, when I was pondering the Standard Model, I knew I should focus on making a game rather than a simulation.

Of course, as I said at the beginning, this is an experiment, and there are a lot of things I’m hoping to learn from it. How best to balance the ‘game’ and the ‘science’? What type of content appeals to players most? What is the most effective way to teach content in a game? I don’t know the answers. But, hopefully after releasing the game and getting feedback, I’ll have some data points to work with as I get to work on my next project.

-Andy